Three years have passed since America took the War on Terrorism to Afghanistan. It’s time to ask how it’s working. Are we better off than we were? Let’s review.
The day after September 11, many Americans thirsted for revenge, and surely that’s what the terrorists who carried out the hijackings were hoping for. Surely, they were calculating that an all-out American attack on a Muslim country would drive a wedge between Islam and the West and send millions of fresh recruits into their Jihadist ranks. At that point the stage was set for a vicious cycle of strike and counterstrike that would have enacted a global version of the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis, with America cast in the role of Israel.

At first, the United States sidestepped the trap. The campaign launched in Afghanistan on October 7 relied on ground troops, but not on American ground troops. Instead, America gave air cover—finally!—to the Northern Alliance forged by Ahmad Shah Massoud, Afghan warriors who had been fighting the Taliban all along and did the bulk of the necessary fighting now.
The Pentagon’s sophisticated weaponry succeeded in targeting the Taliban in and around Kabul rather than the civilians of the city. We know less about casualties in the southern battlefields at Tora Bora and Shahikot, but in Kabul and points north, the Afghans I talked to in 2002 during a summer visit generally felt that America had made war not on Afghanistan but on the Taliban and saw the United States as a liberator.
The day after the Taliban fled Kabul, then, the U.S. was poised to roll back the deluge and make enormous headway toward a new era of peace and progress. At that historical moment, as a victim of the 9/11 attacks, America enjoyed unprecedented goodwill around the world, even among the uncommitted masses in the Muslim world. Had the United States focused all its efforts right then on restoring Afghanistan to the course interrupted 23 years earlier by the Soviet invasion—a course pointed toward moderation, secular modernity, and development, all within an Afghan cultural context—it would have weakened the Jihadist movement dramatically by stripping away its most powerful arguments and examples.
This policy would have strengthened the hand of modernists (a much better word than “moderates”) in the Muslim world, particularly those in a position to enter into theological debates with other Muslims—debates whose vital importance can scarcely be over-stated, for make no mistake: the Muslim world will achieve no social reforms until the claws of the “scholars,” the dictatorial religious establishment and the mullahs, the local rural clerics, have been loosened, and ordinary Muslims have attained the freedom to pursue and express personal visions of Islam. Until that transformation has taken place it is pointless and indeed often ruinous for outsiders to attempt to impose, by fiat, amendments to Muslim society such as democratic elections or governments in which some percentage of cabinet seats are mandated for women—moves which cannot finally give ordinary citizens a share of power or empower women in Islamic societies. Instead, they create a colonialist dichotomy in which all those who question the encrusted orthodox interpretations of Islam become the running dogs of foreign imperialists bent on wrecking the Muslim home. Their voices become utterly discredited, and the deepest bases of social values remain in the hands of the most uncompromising and least liberal, least tolerant, and least educated elements of the society. Ugh!
Imagine the impact it would have had on the Muslim world if today, the news from Afghanistan told of a country cleared of landmines, in which schools and clinics and hospitals had gone up in even the smallest villages, in which good highways made it possible for people to move among the cities and villages freely, in which fields and orchards had been replanted and grains and fruit were being harvested. Imagine if this were now a land in which merchants were busy moving trade goods, in which Afghan entrepreneurs, financed by numerous small banks with money for micro-loans, were pouring out products manufactured in small workshops, sufficient to the needs of Afghanistan and some for export as well, trade that would have sewn the country into a partnership with the larger world, giving Afghans occasion to travel to India and Egypt and Germany and France and the United States on business and drawing people from all countries to Afghanistan—imagine if today, the deep lakes of Bandi Amir and the beautiful cliffs of Bamian, where the world’s tallest sculptures once stood, were bustling tourist destinations, if trekkers were again climbing those Hindu Kush peaks and cheerful Afghan hosts were sitting down with guests at the hot springs of Obeh near Herat—in short, imagine if the world’s most wretched country were now, less than three years later, a testament to the power of humanity to heal.
It could have happened, I tell you. Afghans were ready. Never in your life could you hae imagined a world in which such a history of suffering had left so little resentment, such a cheerful willingness to start over, as I saw in Kabul in the summer of 2002.
But what happened instead?
The smoke of battle had not even begun to settle before George Bush gave his axis of evil speech, and his administration began beating the drum for war in Iraq. No matter what American analysts might think, it was impossible then for anyone in the Muslim world to suppose that Iraq was the single target left in American sights. To the masses in the Muslim world, after Iraq, it would be Syria. After Syria, Libya. After Libya, Iran. After Iran—well, wherever a Muslim lived or where Arabic, Persian, or Urdu was spoken, that would be the eventual target of American bombing in years to come. Such was the future forced upon the imagination of Muslims everywhere—that great, mostly uncommitted population, nearly a billion strong, living largely in poverty and simply looking for a way to achieve a life of dignity and hope.
If you’re not with us, said George Bush, you’re against us. To most Muslims almost anywhere on Earth that meant, you had better give up your religion and your culture, because if we can identify you as being kindred in any way to those bastards who bombed our buildings in New York, even if it’s just the syllables you utter when you pray or the clothes you wear or the folktales you grew up on, we’re coming after you.
From America came the news that if you got arrested and sent to Guantanamo, you would not even be able to get a message out to your friends and family letting them where you were.
From the Muslim world came the news that America would turn over selected prisoners to Egyptian or Saudi authorities, because those folks had no compunction about torture. America’s enemies would suffer while America kept its hands “clean.” If you’re a Muslim teenager in Egypt or Tunisian or Algeria or elsewhere in the Muslim world, you get the message. You had better become indistinguishable from American teenagers, or you will be arrested and handed over to your local torturer.
Man what a mess.
So what’s the news we get instead, from Afghanistan today? One American a week, on average, dying there—and it’s not even reported because so many more are dying in Iraq. Over 10,000 troops still stationed in the country and no end in sight—and no one even notices through the haze of smoke rising from the battlefields of Iraq. A constitution has been promulgated that says in fifty different ways, conservative Muslims will rule this country. Anyone who questions the doctrines of the orthodox will be punished, and yes, that punishment may include death. It doesn’t say so explicitly, but it’s coded into Hanafi jurisprudence which this constitution enshrines as the default law of the land.
Karzai and others huddle in the government complex in Kabul surrounded by high walls and barbed wire and protected by American special forces, trying valiantly to inch toward some negotiated accommodation with the forces of chaos, but without money to spend, there is so little they can do.
Elections were scheduled for June but have been postponed to September. Why? Because the registrars were unable to register enough voters. What if they held an election and no one came? (And yet Afghanistan is in much better shape than Iraq, which is still scheduled for elections in the near future!)
Look: America does have enemies out there. Those enemies do have an agenda. Their agenda is to promote chaos. Anything they can do to disrupt ordinary life abets them. Anything they can do to increase violence promotes their cause. They are best able to prosper and flourish in chaos. Violent disorder is their petri dish. So when we move about the world trailing bloody, smoky destruction in our wake, it’s not “us” we’re helping but “them.”
America’s hopes lie in eliminating violence, nourishing growth, prosperity, peace, and above all—cultural sovereignty for non-Americans. Newt Gingrich, of all people, said it best. What America needs now not more enemies but more allies. The hardcore terrorists number an infinitesimal percentage of the people out there, but they disappear against the camouflage background of general resentment and hostility. Turn all that hostility into goodwill, and then watch: against that background, the terrorists will stand out like flies on vanilla ice cream.